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Forum:Press releases as canon
As this has come up with Phillips (Day 8) and Craig Erwich and probably others, I wanted to get answer on whether or not the official fox press releases should be added to the list of oou-sources where we can get new character names. It was brought up before at User talk:Rebel2477, but never resolved into the canon policy. 24 spoilers, an excellent 24 fansite, has got quite a few of them posted on their site. I'd be in favour of them as they are official and from fox. Anyone else agree/disagree?--Acer4666 12:03, September 7, 2011 (UTC) :I would love to do it, but in general what certainty do we have that they are unaltered? (Additionally, just in terms of the utility of accepting these as name sources, do you have a list of the names we'll have confirmed/or an estimate of how many?) 16:10, September 7, 2011 (UTC) ::I know, that is an issue I thought of, but it's about as reliable as online scripts etc. I plan to contact the person in charge of 24 spoilers to find out where the fox releases came from (perhaps we can verify with a wayback machine if they came off the website or something). ::As for how many, hard to say because I think they are generally on season 7 and 8 which I don't have on dvd (to verify no other source for the name). Tired Alex added a few s8 ones, and there's Nick Coughlin, but I'm not sure if they were later mentioned during the episodes.--Acer4666 16:35, September 7, 2011 (UTC) ::: I strongly believe that Bill Prady spoke Nick Coughlin's name later on. ::: To support this I would want at least a small list of names that would definitely be confirmed from it. This is a bit of a jump and we'd want to make sure this is worthwhile. But most importantly overall is the trustworthiness of the source, so if it's possible to use wayback machine like you mentioned (or some other good method) to verify it all, that is the first step. 19:42, September 7, 2011 (UTC) ::::Yes, I'm unfortunately unable to make a list other than Craig Erwich, as I can't check s7 and s8 ones. ::::As for verifying the content of the releases, I contacted the guy who does 24 spoilers and he says that he got them from foxflash.com. They've since removed the 24 content, and the wayback machine can't access it as you needed a login to view any of it. He says he copied them over and I have no reason to believe he would've changed details, and doing a text search for, say, the craig erwich press release shows 4 different sites that all posted it at the same time (here). I think they are about as reliable as the online scripts we use for names, but I suppose there is an outside chance someone has tampered along the way. I would be happy to accept these releases as canon source of names, but see the issues with verifiability--Acer4666 20:31, September 8, 2011 (UTC) :: I hope there can be more names, in addition to Craig Erwich. 13:39, September 16, 2011 (UTC) ::: Just from going through Season 8 vigilantly checking name sources, there's now 6 names that seem to stem purely from the press releases. I suspect there may be more in Season 7 as well. I believe this would make a canon policy change worthwhile, if everyone supports it (ie, that the official Fox press releases can be used as a source to cull character names along with the current list of "DVD deleted scenes & closed captioning, scripts, episode credits, and out-of-universe sections of fox.com")--Acer4666 (talk) 11:47, April 26, 2014 (UTC) ::::This has now been added to the policy--Acer4666 (talk) 18:04, May 18, 2014 (UTC)